J 1335 
K4 

opy 1 



Oass_lB.il 3 3 

Book ,_K4: 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Ethics of Evolution, 



A Lecture given before The Cambridge Confer- 
ences and The Brooklyn Ethical Association 
f 

BY 

JOHN C. KIMBALL, 

Author of The Evolution of Arms and Armor, Zoology 
and Evolution, Natural Factors in American Civilization, Moral 
Questions in Politics, From Natural to Christian Selection, The 
Old and New Under Evolution, Immortal Youth, The World's 
Coming Better Social Condition As Indicated By Evolutionary 
Principles, &c. 

Copyright 1902 by Chas. M. Higgins. 

PT7ELISHED FOB THB 

BROOKLYN ETHICAL ASSOCIATION 

BY 

CHAS. M. HIGGINS & CO., 

NEW YOEK. CHICAGO. LONDON. 

1902. 




THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Comes Recsived 

OCT, i 1902 

CnPV*l«WT ENTRY 

Cuvw. / i4 — / f 
CI.AS3 <^XXc No. 

i 1 

copy s. 



KEYNOTE. 



/J ND I should define good conduct as the conduct 
voluntarily adopted which has been foitnd by the 
accumulated experiences of mankind, consolidated into 
intuitions and transmitted by heredity, to be most 
co7iducive to the welfare of the individual and of the 
race, and say its rightness has come from its being in 
harmony with natural laws ; and bad conduct as that 
which has been found in the same way to be conducive 
to the ill-being of the individual and of the race, and 
as getting its wrongness from its being in violation 
of natural laws. 

Briefly stated, ethics is humanity s s hygiene. 

— Kimball. 



EDITORIAL. 



'HE present lecture on the Ethics of Evolution is 



i one of a course on The Evolution of Ethics de- 
livered before the Brooklyn Ethical Association in the 
years 1896 and 1897. Some of these lectures were 
also given at the Cambridge Conferences at " The 
Studio House " of Mrs. Ole Bull in Cambridge, Mass., 
of which conferences the late Dr. Lewis Gr. Janes was 
then director, having been previously President of The 
Brooklyn Ethical Association for several terms. The 
full list of these lectures is as follows : — 

Origin of Ethical Ideas, 

Dr. Lewis G. Janes, M. A. 
Ethical Ideas of the Hindus, 

Swami Saradananda of India. 
Ethics of Zoroaster and the Parsis, 

Mr. Jehanghile Dossabhoy Cola, of Bombay, India. 
Ethics of Buddhism, 

Anagarika H. Dharmapala, of Colombo, Ceylon. 
Ethics of The Chinese Sages, 

Prof. F. Huberty James, Imperial University, Peking. 
Ethics of The Greek Philosophers. 

Prof. Jas. H. Hyslop, Columbia University, New York. 




a 



Editorial. 



Ethics of The Stoics and Epicureans, 

Rev. Merle St. Croix Wright, of New York. 
Ethics of the Hebrews, 

Rabbi Joseph Silverman of New York. 
Ethics of The Mohammedans, 

Mr. Z. Sidney Sampson, of New York. 
Ethics of The New Testament, 

Prof. Crawford Howell Toy, D. D., of Harvard Uni- 
versity. 

Ethics of The German Schools, 

Miss Anna Boynton Thompson, of Boston. 
Utilitarian Ethics, 

Dr. Robert G. Eccles of Brooklyn, and 

Prof. Benjamin Underwood, of Quincy, 111. 
Ethics of Evolution, 

Rev. John C. Kimball, of Sharon, Mass., and 
M. Mangassarin of New York. 

This series of lectures was proposed and arranged 
chiefly by our former esteemed President, Mr. Z. Sidney 
Sampson, whose death in 1897, followed by some 
changes in the Association, has been one of the causes 
which have helped to delay the publication. 

Most of the lectures of the series as above catalogued 
are now in plates ready for printing, and all of these 
lectures will be ultimately included in one large volume 
which is soon to be issued, and some one or more lec- 
tures w T ill also be printed in smaller special volumes 
according as their special importance or popularity 
may warrant. 

The present lecture of Mr. Kimball on the Ethics of 
Evolution has been thought to be specially deserving of 
a place in our series on the Evolution of Ethics, on 
account of the extreme clearness and simplicity in his 
exposition of the basic principles of the rationalistic, 



Editorial. 



naturalistic or evolutionary schools of thought, and also 
by reason of the effective way in which he has solved 
to his satisfaction, both as a Christian and an Evo- 
lutionist, some of the chief "problems" or moral 
"paradoxes" in the "Ethics of Evolution." This lec- 
ture is the first of the series to be printed in individual 
form, and but a small edition is now issued, by special 
request, but a larger edition will follow later. 

It was our intention to print this lecture together 
with Dr. Janes' lecture on The Evolution of Ethics and 
Prof. Underwood's lecture on Utilitarian Ethics, the 
three together to form one little volume which would 
give a good epitome of the Naturalistic, Rationalistic 
or Evolutionary school of Ethics, but this purpose we 
shall have to leave for fulfillment in a later edition. 

The other lectures which will soon be issued in indi- 
vidual volumes are as follows : 
The Ethics of The Greek Philosophers; 

by Prof. Hyslop. 
The Ethics of The New Testament, 

by Prof. Toy, 
and The Ethics of the Chinese Sages, 

by the late Prof. F. Huberty James, 
whose capture and death in Peking on June 20, 1900, 
after a most important service rendered to the Chinese 
and the foreigners, was one of the most tragic events of 
the siege. . C M. H. 

271 Ninth St., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
August 20, 1902. 



c 



PREFACE. 



This lecture was originally given before The Cam- 
bridge Conferences under the presidency of Dr. Lewis 
G. Janes ; then was read before The Brooklyn Ethic- 
al Association, of Brooklyn, N. Y., and it is now 
printed by the kindness of Mr. Charles M. Higgins, 
a member of said Association. 

A few changes have been made in its allusions and 
illustrations to bring it up to present date, but other- 
wise it retains its first form as one of a series on the 
general subject of Ethics. 

J. C. K. 

Unitarian Parsonage, Sharon, Mass., 
June 30, 1902. 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



BY JOHN C. KIMBALL. 



The subject of this paper is distinctively the Ethics of 
Evolution, not the Evolution of Ethics — in other words, 
is the kind of ethics to which man is logically brought by 
the process of evolution, and not the process itself by 
which the results are brought about Nevertheless, as 
there are differences of view among evolutionists with 
regard to the exact nature of the process, and as the 
results reached depend for their certainty somewhat on 
the view taken of how they are reached, I want, as a pre- 
liminary, to review the process part of the matter, and to 
state what is special in my own conception of its nature. 

First, while accepting in general the revised utilitarian 
theory that ethics is the outcome under evolution of the 
accumulated experiences of our race with regard to what 
is fittest in conduct, consolidated into intuitions and 
transmitted from generation to generation by heredity, 
the theory so brilliantly set forth by Mr. Spencer and his 
disciples, I cannot go with them in the prominence they 
give to pleasure and pain as the chief things for which 
these experiences have been useful, or in holding, as they 
state it, that " acts are good or bad according as their 
aggregate effects increase men's happiness or increase 
their misery." 



2 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



Utilitarianism is not necessarily confined to utility for 
happinesa To get at nature's form of it we must get at 
what nature wants things to be useful for, that is, at what 
nature in evolution is trying to bring about. What is it ? 
Plainly, not pleasure alone, or pleasure even in the form 
of happiness, but growth, fuller and finer life, an ever 
better state of things alike in the universe at large and in 
its individual parts. As Longfellow has truly put it : 

'* Not enjoyment and not sorrow 

It our destined end or way, 
But to act that each to-morrow 

Finds ub farther than to-day." 

And the word utility, therefore, fairly includes every- 
thing which goes to promote this object. Pleasure is 
only one of these things, is a means and not an end, the 
guide and not the goal, the feather with which nature 
tips the arrow of conduct to send it the straighter to its 
mark, and not the mark itself. And even allowing it is 
an infallible guide, even allowing, what is undoubtedly 
true, that all good conduct tends in the end to happiness, 
and all bad conduct to misery, it surely is a mistake to 
put the means of a thing in the place of its end as con- 
stituting its distinctive character. 

Compare conduct in this respect with the eating and 
drinking of food. These acts are pleasant, and the pleas- 
ure of them is beyond question the immediate motive 
which prompts them ; and normally, food is good or bad 
according as it is agreeable or disagreeable to the taste. 
But nature's object in having us eat and drink is not the 
pleasure of eating and drinking, but growth, health, 
efficiency for work ; and her supreme test as to whether 
food and drink are good or bad is whether they build us 
up as men and women and enable us the better to do our 
work in the world. 



The Ethics of Evolution. 3 



So with what is the food and drink of humanity's 
larger body. The hedonist is right in saying that its 
goodness and pleasantness must in the long run go 
together — is re-stating only the old Scripture doctrine 
that "wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness." But its 
goodness does not consist in its pleasantness, but in its 
being morally nutritious, and so promotive of the doer's 
inner health and strength. Mr. Spencer himself has 
places in which he recognizes this to be the real criterion, 
as where he says, "Evolution becomes highest when the 
conduct simultaneously achieves the greatest totality of 
life in self, in offspring, and in fellow men." 

There is one word in our language which expresses 
grandly all these ends, a word which includes happiness, 
yet is beset with none of its objectionable implications, 
the wora " welfare." And I should define good conduct as 
the conduct voluntarily adopted which has been found 
by the accumulated experiences of mankind, consolidated 
into intuitions and transmitted by heredity, to be most 
conducive to the welfare of the individual and of the 
race, and say its Tightness has come from its being in 
harmony with natural laws ; and bad conduct as that 
which has been found in the same way to be conducive 
to the ill -being of the individual and of the race, and as 
getting its wrongness from its being in violation of nat- 
ural laws. 

Briefly stated, ethics is humanity's hygiene. 

But while utility is thus the test objectively of all con- 
duct as to its goodness or badness, whatever its source 
may be, it seems to me, yet farther, that to give any form 
of it subjectively an ethical character, its motive, purpose, 
cost of effort, ought to be made more prominent than they 
have been thus far by evolutionists. 



4 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



I cannot indeed go with those who would make the 
motive everything in determining the moral value of an 
act, for the world is full of cases in which the most out- 
rageous deeds have had behind them motives which in 
themselves were sincerely good. It is not only hell 
down below, but some of the darkest, direst hells up here 
on earth which are paved with good intentions. It was 
a good intention which introduced slavery into America, 
kindled the fires of Smithfield, ordered the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew, beheaded Sir Henry Yane, burned 
Joan of Arc, crucified Jesus Christ, and, indeed, if the 
Bible account is to be trusted, it was a good intention 
which at first introduced into the world "sin and all our 
woe." 

But, on the other hand, if outward utility is made the 
sole test, some of the grandest deeds humanity has ever 
risen to — liberty's ten thousand defeated battle-fields, 
religion's long list of martyrs whose blood never became 
the seed of any church, reforms which perished in dun- 
geon cells, and the vast army of seekers after scientific 
truth who found only error or failure — all these will have 
to be set down as ethically bad ; while at the same time 
not a few deeds whose prompting was the meanest and 
sometimes the wickedest motives, but which unexpectedly 
turned out well, as, for instance, the stealing of negroes 
from Africa, England's persecution of our Puritan ances- 
tors, the slaveholders' rebellion, Joseph's being sold by 
his brethren into Egypt, and even the old serpent's 
tempting of Adam and Eve into sin, must be regarded as 
good conduct. Last summer a dog on the St Lawrence 
River leaped bravely into the water and rescued from 
drowning a child that had fallen from the wharf. Of 
course everybody praised and petted and daintily fed 
him for the act; and the next day, wanting more of such 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



5 



treatment, and no child falling in to afford him the 
means of meriting it, the hedonistically philosophic 
animal deliberately pushed a nice little girl overboard 
and again plunged in for her rescue, evidently very much 
puzzled at the apparent inconsistency of ethics, when, on 
bringing her ashore, instead of caresses he received kicks. 
And if outward acts alone are to be considered, who 
shall say the dog did not have some reason for his disap- 
pointment, the deed itself in each case being the same. 

Evidently, the only way of avoiding such inconsistency 
is to recognize both factors, the motive and the result, as 
contributing to render conduct ethical ; and it is a recog- 
nition which has the fullest sanction of evolution. For 
all motives, whether they lead outwardly to failure or to 
success, have a reflex action inwardly on their subject, 
which must be taken into the account. If they are mean 
and bad, no matter how helpful to the world's welfare 
their outcome may be, they make the man himself mean 
and bad ; if noble and good, no matter how utter their 
outward failure, they give him within a nobler and better 
soul. And this inner growth transmitted by heredity 
and consolidated into character becomes in after genera- 
tions as truly a part of the world's ethical possessions as 
anything which results outwardly from conduct. 

Instead of its being true, therefore, that " some rise by 
sin, and some by virtue fall," the truth is that goodness, 
though often mistaken in its action and leading in some 
things to harm, never wholly fails; and evil, though 
sometimes acting rightly and leading to some forms of 
benefit, never wholly succeeds. Though out of Spanish 
lust for gold came the discovery and exploration of this 
new world, all the same out of it came Spain's own 
decay. The cruelty which wrenched from Indian hands 
" the pearl of the Antilles " secreted in its own blood the 



6 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



acid which all these later years has been dissolving it in 
the conqueror's very grasp. The valor of Naseby and 
Marston Moor, of York town and Appomattox Court 
House, was the reflex action of liberty's ten thousand 
defeated battle-fields ; and the martyrs' blood in religion 
which was never the seed of any church became the seed 
not less surely of the whole coming man. 

"The aim, if reached or not, makes grand the life." 

Again, as regards the altruistic element in ethics, I can 
but think that evolutionists, in taking a fully developed 
egoism as its starting point, have mistaken the process of 
its origin, and thereby have made for themselves a very 
needless difficulty. We all remember Pope's famous 
lines : 

" Self love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, 

As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. 
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds, 
Another still and still another spreads. 
Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace, 
His country next, and next the human race." 

But ontologically it is vastly more probable that the 
real order was exactly the other way, the wider circle 
coming first, or, rather, it is probable that evolution fol- 
lowed here the same order as everywhere else, differen- 
tiated the various forms of love altogether out of one 
original homogeneity of feeling in which they all existed 
only as undeveloped possibilities, just as in astronomy 
nature did not make the planets, the satellites, and the 
sun all complete and then unite them in the solar system, 
but started them as one common nebulous mist, and 
evolved at the same time the system and its members. 
The ego and the alter are thus not father and child, but 
twin brothers, — 

" Self love and social at one birth began,"— 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



7 



it being philosophically just as impossible to develop the 
one without the other as in magnetism to get a north pole 
without getting equally a south pole. In the lower forms 
of life the two are only partially differentiated even now, 
their communities having a common gregarious self in 
which the individual selves are hardly more distinct than 
are those of its cells in an animal body. Years ago, 
before I had learned my wider ethical relations, and so, 
though ordained to be a fisher of men, used occasionally 
in the summer to indulge in being a fisher of fish, I have 
been in a line of boats off the Beverly shore half a mile 
long, pulling in mackerel as fast as the hook could be 
thrown, when suddenly, though the water remained full 
of them, they would cease biting with me and at the same 
time with every boat in the line. Then after half an hour 
or so, just as my ministerial conscience was regaining its 
sway, and about to send me home to my proper vocation, 
my hook would be seized, and instantly I would hear the 
captives flapping into boats the whole length of the line, 
evidently as much the result of one impulse as if they had 
been a single fish. Wordsworth with his close observa 
tion of nature noticed the same trait long ago in a herd of 
cattle : 

" The cattle are grazing, their heads never raising, 
There are forty feeding as one." 

Haeckel somewhere describes a creature named the 
flimmer-ball, whose parts some of the time swim about 
as independently as a shoal of minnows, but which, when 
frightened, unite again and move as one organic mass. 
Bees in a swarm are but a single body. And among 
human beings the same all-embracing tribal self is to be 
seen in the sway of fashion, in all boyhood's simultane- 
ously bringing out its marbles with the first warm days 
of spring, and in the uniformity with which Easter 



3 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



bonnets appear as a part of Easter religion on the heads of 
all women, and summer hats disappear about the tenth of 
September, as by a common inner breeze, from the heads 
of all men. Especially is it seen in all panics, as at the 
battle of Chancellors ville, when the whole Eleventh Army 
Corps, with eyes bulging and hair on end, came rushing 
back pell mell on the very bayonets of the corps behind 
them, a vast shoal of human beings turned into a gigantic 
flimmer-ball in which all individual selves reverted to the 
common animal self out of which they had been evolved- 
With this homogeneity of the ego and alter to start 
with, corresponding with what in paleontology is called 
" a prophetic type," it is easy to see that as it differenti- 
ated into distinct individuals, each individual must have 
inherited and developed in itself some share of what was 
in the original common stock, regard for self and regard 
for the whole, so that the command of Jesus, " Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself," that is, as being thy larger 
self, is not a mere arbitrary precept, but an ethic of evo- 
lution which has behind it the foundation principle of all 
society. 

It is a process which is still going on, integration, the 
third great stage of evolution, being the phase of it which 
is now most in evidence ; and as in astronomy when the 
separating planets were organized into the solar system, 
the gravity which had made them originally one nebulous 
mass was not lost, but became the force which is now 
holding them organically together and keeping them for- 
ever acting on each other, so by the same beautiful law, 
as fast as the units of our race are integrated in their 
social system, the regard for the common homogeneous 
self which they had at first, becomes the affection which 
holds them in altruistic relations, and makes each of them 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



9 



still interested in the welfare of the whole, so that as 
Pope says : 

" There's not a blessing Individuals find 

But somehow leans and barkens to mankind." 

Again, as regards the origin of that mysterious feeling 
in ethics which is ordinarily denoted by the little word 
" ought," or, when we want to talk Kant, by the big words, 
"categorical imperative," it seems tome that evolution- 
ists, in trying to derive it from the inherited teachings of 
those in authority, from the dread of punishment, from 
the reasoning that to get rights ourselves we must give 
them to others, and the like, have justly exposed their 
efforts to the criticisms of unbelievers, and have failed to 
use one of the most fundamental and far-reaching of their 
own principles, the natural tendency of things to vary ; a 
principle set forth so clearly by Mr. Darwin in his great 
work on the Origin of Species, and one which exists not 
only in all forms of outward life, but in all parts of our 
inward being. Oughtness, obligation, is indeed, as all the 
intuitional opponents of ethical evolution insist, a new 
species of feeling ; but there is no reason to suppose that 
it did not originate, like all other new species of things, 
simply as a variation by minute changes from an older 
and more primitive species. It was probably at first the 
simple compulsion to get food and to do the other imme- 
diate visible things which were found by experience to be 
necessary for the continuance of life ; then in the course 
of ages, it varied with men, into the abstract feeling of 
compulsion to do whatever the inherited experiences of 
the race had shown to be essential for its welfare, those 
that had the variations and acted upon them surviving 
and leaving descendants, those that had them not, 
inevitably dying out. Must, — that is the missing link 
in the chain between appetite and oughtness \ duty — that 



10 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



the Messiah which came to men, as Jesus did, that they 
might have life and have it more abundantly. A rudi- 
mentary indication of its humble origin still remains in 
the very words of the beatitude which is its highest ex- 
pression, " Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled." And thus, 
instead of the moral law's being dragged down by evolu- 
tion, as Mr. Balfour sneers, from the sublimity of the 
starry heavens to the ingenuity of the protective blotches 
on a beetle's wing, is not its real grandeur increased by 
its being made by it, like gravity, — rather, like Deity, a 
power which holds both the starry heavens and the hum- 
blest dust all in one comprehensive grasp ? 

Beyond oughtness, and as a crown to all the other fac- 
tors concerned in ethical evolution, I have to recognize 
that of free will, not free will of the illusive nature that 
many evolutionists have made it, that is, freedom to will 
what one pleases, what pleases being as fixed in its action 
as what forces, nor yet free will as itself a cause and orig- 
inator of force, — I cannot follow Mr. Martineau in that 
conception, — but tree will as a self-determining faculty, 
able to choose which among pleasing things shall be its 
motive, and a director of causes and forces, — the free will 
which makes with heredity and environment the three 
great factors of all conduct. I know well the difficulties 
such a free will involves as regards law and motive and 
the chain of cause and effect, and that the exact process 
of its origin under evolution has never been explained. 
But it is no harder to deal with in this respect than life, 
or self-consciousness, or any of man's higher spiritual fac- 
ulties, — is simply one round more of a ladder, each of 
which, though taking us into a world which is outside of 
all previous science, is found ultimately to take us to one 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



11 



which is inside of a yet larger science. It is what we are 
as directly conscious of as we are of existence itself ; and 
the recognition of its reality is the only thing which can 
save evolution from the charge of a fraud at the very 
foundation of man's moral nature, the only thing which 
can give ethics its supremely distinctive character over all 
other conduct, or make it otherwise than a very delicate 
kind of mechanism , the only thing out of which it can 
get honestly its feelings of responsibility, remorse and 
self-approval. So I say with Emerson : 

" For he who worketh high and wise, 
Nor pauses in his plan, 
Will take the sun out of the ekiea 
Ere freedom out of man." 

Passing now from these special points in the process of 
ethical evolution, to the results of the process, the first 
thing to be noticed is that ethical evolution does not ex- 
clude those results which have been arrived at by other 
systems, but includes alike them and their explanations, — 
differing in this respect from all other systems. The 
others are like the medical student at an emergency 
hospital where a good deal of rivalry existed to see which 
of the young men, when a call came to them for the 
ambulance, would get to the injured man first and bring 
him in. Having a very slow horse, this student was 
for a long while the last at the accident, and returning 
so often empty wagoned, he was a good deal jeered at by 
his comrades for his ill success. By and by a change 
occurred by which he got a fresh young horse, and the 
very next day came in ahead of all the rest with four 
wounded men. The question at once arose of how 
he had done it. " Oh," said he, gleefully, " I drove full 
speed with my new horse to the one knocked-down man 
I was called to, and in galloping back I knocked down 



12 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



myself three more men and brought them along also." 
That is exactly what ethics hitherto has done, — in getting 
to its operating room any one of the world's four great 
systems, the theological, the legal, the intuitional and the 
utilitarian, it has had to knock down each of the other 
three and has brought in their shattered remains also. 

Ethical evolution on the other hand is like the well- 
known Irish soldier with the group of prisoners he one 
day captured and brought into camp. Instead of knock- 
ing down either theology, law, utility or intuitionalism, 
it has captured them all without a bruise or a blow, aa 
he did, by simply "surrounding them." 

It is this which is the distinguishing mark of all great 
truths, their reconciling and including on a higher plane 
what lower down were only antagonistic half truths ; and 
I know of nothing in the history of human thought 
which has done this so completely and beautifully, and 
with such a wealth of far-reaching suggestions as Herbert 
Spencer's Data of Ethics. Somebody has called it his 
weakest book. But to my mind it is his strongest and 
most original, not excepting even his Psychology, — the 
Columbus discovery of a new continent on the globe 
of truth. Its hedonism is only the mistake of supposing 
its new world to be the old Indias, not affecting seriously 
its real grandeur. And, if he had written nothing else, 
this alone would have made him what I believe the 
future will writt him, the leading mind of the nineteenth 
century. 

Equally, evolution includes and justifies the various 
practical ethics of all nations, races and ages. Take the 
great central ones now held by all civilized people as the 
highest to which the human mind has come, — temperance, 
chastity, honesty, veracity, benevolence, self-sacrifice, 



The Ethics of Evolu tion. 



13 



good citizenship, reverence and the like, — evolution 
does not with its moving into its ethical house propose 
to store them all away, like old furniture, into the garret 
of the past, and put brand new ones in their place,, any 
more than the nebular hypothesis proposes to change 
the stars, or geology to re-make the strata of the earth. 
It recognizes that like the stars and the earth they may 
in the course of ages be modified and have new relations, 
but it will be with no shock, no interregnum of virtue 
and duty. All evolution is in its very nature con- 
servative. It points out how everything which is has a 
tap-root reaching down the eons into the world's primal 
dust, — shows how its future will have to come, not 
by any fiat of religion, or science, or legislation, but as 
the slow outgrowth of the present and the past. And, 
pre-eminently, it does so with regard to our age's great 
central virtues and duties, — traces them from their far-off 
beginnings, shows that though often poorly kept, they 
have survived, according to its own principles, only 
because in their struggle for existence they have been 
found the fittest for men to live by, and emphasizes that 
by its own definition of ethics as that conduct which is 
most conducive to human welfare, they are the ethics of 
evolution. 

Look at the history of one of them which many 
persons have thought to be the most incapable of origi- 
nating and flourishing and being sanctioned under the 
doctrine of utility, that of self-sacrifice. How, it is asked, 
can a kind of conduct which consists in the individual's 
giving up his own life, and a nation's giving up the lives 
of its noblest and best citizens, be conducive, in this 
world at any rate, to either individual or social welfare V 

Well, to get at its root we must go back far beyond 
humanity into that homogeneousness of tribal life and 



14 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



care, out of which egoism and altruism have alike come. 
When a flock of grasshoppers out on the prairie meets a 
line of burning grass, its foremost ranks do not turn back, 
as a single grasshopper would, but unhesitatingly plunge 
in, and the rest do the same, and so on, each perishing 
till the fire is extinguished and a bridge formed over 
which the main body, or, perhaps, as the only ones left, 
the rear ranks, pass on. It looks at first like a magnifi- 
cent example of self-sacrifice away down in the lower 
parts of the animal kingdom, something which could 
not originate in any evolutionized love of life, or in any- 
thing but a Heaven-implanted altruism. But really the 
swarm is only one large, loosely -jointed body, a part of 
which dies to save the other part, and is precisely what 
every individual animal does with the cells of which it 
is made up when it wants to rush through fire, is pre- 
cisely what the most selfish person does when about to 
fall, — flings out his hands to get bruised rather than 
have his whole body harmed, — is done from the love of 
their common life. And when this common life with its 
common love develops, as it does in man, into individual 
lives with their individual wills and selves, how natural 
it is that the instinctive impulse to their common pres- 
ervation, sacrificing a part to save the whole, should 
develop with them into that grand voluntary altruism 
which can sing that 

"Whether on the scaffold high, 
Or in the battle's van 
The noblest place for man to die 
Is where he dies for man." 

How inevitable is it also, that those tribes of animals 
and those nations of men which have the most of such 
individuals ready to sacrifice themselves in battle and in 
danger for the common good, should survive, while those 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



15 



which have them not, or have the fewest of them, must 
inevitably in the struggle for existence be overwhelmed 
and perish, the evolutionary fulfillment of Jesus' words, 
"he that findeth his life, shall lose it," — lose it in the 
dying out of his tribe ; " and he that loseth his life for my 
sake shall find it again," — find it in the larger life of his 
nation and his race. And who shall say that the fagots 
around the martyr's stake are any the less ethical because 
they are thus only at the upper end of a long line of fires 
at whose other extreme a flock of grasshoppers died ; or 
that the cross on which Jesus hung, "towering o'er the 
wrecks of time," loses any of its moral grandeur because 
its foot rests in the ashes of earth's unnumbered animal 
myriads that gave their little undivided shares of life 
in order that the world's great whole might live ; or that 
Mr. Kidd is not most profoundly mistaken when he 
declares in his " Social Evolution," that there is nothing 
in nature which can prompt a man to sacrifice his present 
good for the good of posterity, and that we must go to a 
heavenly religion to get what is thus rooted at the begin- 
ning in every phase of earthly life and without which no 
earthly life could ever be ? 

But, while the ethics of evolution thus includes the 
highest existing ethics and those of the highest races, it 
includes, also, jusfc as certainly, those of the lowest 
character, alike in the present and the past, and of the 
lowest races, even the most savage and uncivilized ones. 
And how is it possible for any set of things grouped 
under the same name to be more utterly different from 
each other than many of these are? Look at a few speci- 
mens. The Ashantee girl who, when she wants to be 
very dressy, ties a twig to her back hair, — puts on this 
and nothing more, — is morally shocked at the English 



16 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



girl who is so ashamed of her natural charms that she 
covers them up with yards of cloth. A man with only 
one wife is despised for his selfishness by the Mokololo 
women exactly as an old bachelor without any wife is by 
all self-respecting Christian women. Filial duty among 
the Fijians is performed by a son's tenderly burying his 
old mother alive. Honesty is practised among the tribes 
of the Philippine Islands by their keeping a careful debit 
and credit account of each other's cut-off heads — tribes 
that some of our statesmen to-day are anxious to make our 
fellow American citizens. A Mayoruma man's great 
objection to becoming a Christian was that if killed in 
battle he was liable to be buried and eaten up by worms, 
instead of being broiled and consumed by human beings. 
An Asiatic chief in his last sickness, being urged by a 
missionary to forgive his enemies as a preparation for 
dying, answered with the most self-righteous complac- 
ency that he hadn't any, — he had already killed them alL 
And generally the graces and good deeds by which a 
savage expects to be saved are the number of lives he has 
taken, the extent to which he has hated his foes, the 
amount of property he has stolen, and the success with 
which he has lied. 

It is a difference which no other ethical system has 
been able to explain, except as the work of an evil spirit 
or of man's inherent depravity, but which under evolu- 
tion becomes perfectly explicable as the prompting of his 
inherent goodness, each form of it being the kind of 
ethics which the people producing it have found to be in 
their circumstances and for their stage of development 
most conducive to their preservation and welfare. 

Look at one of its apparently worst manifestations, 
that of children's putting their parents to death as soon 
as they arrive at old age, so different from the civilized 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



17 



one of caring for them then as the most delightful of 
duties. It has been explained as the prompting of a 
religious belief that as people die, mature and strong, or 
old and weak, so in the future they will always be. But 
its origin is really ethical. Among tribes liable at any 
moment to be attacked by foes, and always living on the 
narrowest margin of food, the old are a burden whose 
keeping or removal makes all the difference between 
extinction or survival. Those tribes which kept them 
alive were starved and defeated ; those which killed them 
became strong and victorious. The killing proved to be 
the conduct most conducive to the common welfare ; and 
just as the Knssian mother in her sleigh pursued by 
wolves, flung to them a part of her children to save the 
rest, so these poor savages, pursued by the wolves of 
famine and war, threw over from their life-carriage those 
who had come to their second childhood, rather than see 
their whole tribe perish. Friends, let us thank God we 
are living in a social state where such things are no longer 
needed ; but let us not talk of total depravity, and of no 
ethics at all among those, — our own ancestors probably 
doing the same thing, — who by such acts have brought 
us safely through the wilds of time to our civilized 
home. Their deeds are but side blossoms on that one 
great tree of sacrifice, flowering with so many yellow 
and crimson petals, on whose topmost bough is the 
blossom that all Christendom honors to-day as ethics' 
highest reach. 

It is this necessary relativity of conduct to a people's 
social condition which explains the degradation of their 
life which civilization so often carries to the barbarous 
races. Because the higher ethics are good for Christian 
lands, it does not follow that they are necessarily good 
for some far off isle of the sea just emerging from 



18 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



savagery, or from some nearer new state out West like 
prize-ring Nevada, just sinking back into brutality. The 
story is told of an old farmer who having a two-year-old 
colt he wished to train so as not to shy at every unex- 
pected sight and sound, mounted him one morning and 
ordered his young son to hide behind the fence at the 
end of the lane and "boo" at him as he came along. 
Down the lane they went, the animal with his ears erect 
and his head alert, ready with the first appearance of a 
foe to take the alarm ; and at the appointed place out 
rushed the boy flinging up his hat and at the top of his 
voice shouting " Boo-oo ! " Instantly up in the air went 
the colt's heels and flat on the ground went his rider's 
body. " You young rascal, you ! " exclaimed the irate 
old man, picking himself up and shaking his fist at the 
boy, "what did you frighten that horse for? " " Why, 
father", replied the young hopeful, "you told me to run 
out and say " boo." "Well" answered the sire cooling 
down, but still somewhat severely, "it was altogether too big 
a boo for such a small horse." So with the exalted Christian 
morality that our young missionaries have shouted to 
the world's old heathen tribes mounted on their half- 
tamed social state, it has been " altogether too big a boo 
for such a small horse," and the result has been, as m 
the Sandwich Islands, their prostration physically and 
morally to the earth. 

On the other hand, we have in our modern civilization 
not a few ethical principles and ethical practices which 
are the outcome of evolution and entirely appropriate 
to a savage and half -civilized state, but whose requisite 
environment the world has outgrown, and that are as 
harmful and incongruous now as those of civilization 
are to savagery. Just as in the human body there are 
rudimentary organs like the coecal sac of the intestines, 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



19 



the thyroid gland of the throat, the muscles of the 
scalp, the frontal sinus of the brain, and the air passages 
between the mouth and the ear, which are the shrivelled 
and often harmful remnants of devices that were large 
and valuable in the animals from which the human body 
came, so in humanity's social body we have the same phe- 
nomena, ethics which in our animal and savage ancestry 
were all right, but which in its* civilized state have only 
the place and are doing only the mischief of rudimentary 
organs. Awhile ago one of the Dime Museums over in 
Boston had on exhibition an orang-outang named Joe, 
that his captors had dressed up in gentlemen's clothes, 
and taught to eat with a knife and fork, drink out of a 
glass, hold receptions, and even write on a card. But 
his anatomy and brain and all his own natural actions 
were those still of a wild man of the woods. Well, what 
are the ethics of our newspapers, our congresses, our 
pugilistic encounters, our tariff laws and our Bradley- 
Martin balls but moral Joe Outangs, — practices evolved 
in the woods and well enough there, but which are now 
only dressed up in civilized clothes, taught the outside 
rules of etiquette, and enabled to hold receptions, 
wield a pen, write articles and sometimes sermons, and 
that are fit only to be shown in Dime Museums ? 

Nor is the contrast that of ludicrousness alone. All 
savages in the midst of their ferocity have some regard 
for children as conducive to the tribal welfare; and 
one day out in Borneo, a Dyak warrior was seen running 
through a captured village, holding tenderly under one 
arm a little infant, and grasping under the other the 
gory head of its slain father. We are horrified at the 
thought of such an act in a savage ; but what is all our 
civilization as yet but the mingling of the ethics which 
on the one side holds orphan children in its asylum arms, 



20 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



and on the other builds battle ships and raises vast 
armies with which to grasp in war the gory heads by 
the hundred thousand of the children's slain fathers, — 
what all our Jingo statesmen but would be Dyak savages? 

It is this which is the real ethical character of all 
modern war, a mixing up of methods and virtues which 
were once vital elements in the world's great struggle for 
existence, but which it has now largely outgrown, with 
the finer and often directly antagonistic ones that are the 
special feature of our own later time. 

Look at our recent war with Spain as a good illustra- 
tion of their incompatibility. We began it professedly 
in the interests of altruism and philanthropy, — when it 
broke out were sending food by the hundred thousand 
dollars' worth to Cuba's starving reconcentrados. What 
was the war's first act? To blockade Cuban ports so 
that neither our own nor any other vessels could get to 
their relief, thus carrying on Spain's work of starvation 
in a more horrible form than she herse]f had ever 
thought of. What was the relation of our country's 
undoubted courage, gallantry and heroism towards 
Spain all through the struggle ? That of a strong, well- 
fed, modern-armed man, ruthlessly trampling down a 
weak, underfed, crutches-armed cripple. What are the 
ethics of the two miserable wars which are now being 
waged by the world's two leading nations? Those of im- 
perialism and "criminal aggression," to extend liberty and 
republicanism ; those of starving women to make their 
husbands want peace ; those of water-cure tortures to help 
on the enemy's veracity; those of a treachery in captur- 
ing the Filipino leader that an Iroquois Indian would 
have been ashamed of, accompanied with a denunciation 
of the Filipino people as having no sense of honor, that a 
knight of chivalry might have felt 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



21 



Who can wonder that the nations urging such moral 
standards are themselves becoming demoralized ? 

The fact is, war is a rudimentary organ in the body 
of our modern civilization, — our thirty- feet- thirteen-inch 
cannon, with all their hugeness, but the vermiform appen- 
dix to the ethics of evolution ; and however useful such 
an organ may have been in digesting the crude moral 
food of our wilder state, it is not strange that its presence 
now should result in cases of national appendicitis. 

With the rudimentary ethics of the past, now anti- 
quated and dying out, Evolution has also what may be 
called its embryonic, or growing ethics, which, though the 
very opposite of the other in its own youth, is neverthe- 
less equally the product of a by-gone age. It is a well 
known fact of biology that each animal, including even 
man, has in its growth to pass through all the ancestral 
forms from the ameba up, out of which its race has been 
evolved. A similar thing takes place in a man's moral 
growth, his passing through all the various forms of it 
from that of the savage up, which society has ever 
known, only here it occurs after his physical birth. It 
is thus that we have infant ethics, schoolboy ethics, foot- 
ball ethics, politician ethics, sportman ethics and court- 
ship ethics, all mixed in with our civilized Christian ethics, 
and gradually leading up out of themselves into its 
higher form. 

Many a poor mother does not understand the necessity 
of these lower stages, and so when she sees her darling 
boy begin his moral life by telling lies, killing cats, 
swearing oaths, stealing tarts, fighting other boys, domi- 
neering over his little sister, and similar undeveloped 
ethical performances, she is in despair, fears the gallows 
is the only moral agency which will ever lift him up, 



22 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



and wonders how civilized people like herself and his 
father could ever have given birth to such a savage, — 
has his actions pointed to, perhaps, by her minister as 
evidences of his inborn total depravity. 

Let her not be alarmed. They are only the inevitable 
rounds of the moral ladder he is climbing over into his 
ethical manhood. Give him plenty of good bread and 
butter and play and parental love, and a modicum of minis- 
ter and Sunday School, and unless he is a case of arrest- 
ed development, some of which, alas, the highest evolu- 
tion does now and then show, she will see him rise out 
of all which is thus embryonic into an adult ethics which 
is all that even a mother's prayers have ever asked for. 

Then, as accounting for another part of the mixed 
morality which under evolution we find in the world, is 
the necessity nature is under, when she wants to make 
some very great improvement in society, — change it, say, 
from a military to an industrial state, or from savagery into 
civilization, — the necessity of tearing up and rendering 
useless much of what was once her very precious work. 
If anybody thinks evolution is all plain sailing, either 
physically or morally, — thinks that nature never has any 
perplexities and hard problems to solve and to hesitate 
over, he is woefully mistaken. Some of us passing 
through Boston a few years ago, while its great subway 
was being built, had an opportunity to notice the awful 
havoc that had to be made with the city's past conveni- 
ences, and the awful condition of the old streets which 
resulted, — indeed the Hub people are not yet over feeling 
sore at what they suffered during the insertion of this new 
spoke in their wheel. But no engineer tunneling a 
subway through Boston ever came across so many sacred 
graveyards, networks of gas pipe and water pipe, invol v- 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



23 



ing now and then a terrible explosion, foundations of old 
churches, concealed cesspools and venerable Sam Adams 
monuments, which he had to cut through and push aside, 
as evolution does every time it opens a way into any 
new part of its domains. 

See how it has been in securing man's physical rectitude. 
The animal body from which the human one was derived, 
going as it did on all fours, had the valves of its veins, the 
ligaments which support its embryo young, and the lenses 
and muscles of its eyes, all admirably adjusted to its 
horizontal position. But when nature wanted to set 
the animal upright and make a man's body out of it, all 
these arrangements contrived and fixed with such ages 
of care became wrong in their position, and no longer of 
any use, the valves in the horizontal veins where they 
are not needed instead of in the perpendicular one where 
they are needed, the ligaments at the side of their burden 
instead of under it, and the optic lenses and muscles 
usable only by a strain out of their natural position, so 
that not a few of the weaknesses, sicknesses and imper- 
fections of the human body, including its spectacle-wear- 
ing, have arisen inevitably from its being set physically 
upright. 

So when nature set man morally upright, it involved 
a similar undoing of his old ethics : the checks and sup- 
ports provided for his animal estate became useless, his 
appetites and instincts tending one way, his aspirations 
and intuitions another, while to see duty clearly, he had 
to get artificial helps. And now, every time a great 
reform is introduced into society, that is, the giving of it 
more uprightness, it involves inevitably a disturbance of 
the old safeguards, a breaking up of the old associations, 
and the making of it for awhile an ethical, subway- build- 
ing Boston. 



24 The Ethics of Evolution. 

Coming in part under this same head is the confusion 
of duties which arises in a transition state from the 
necessity not of suppressing all at once a lower set of 
principles to make way for a higher set, but of keeping for 
awhile both of them in active operation. Nature in 
evolution does not bring one stage of progress sharply to 
an end before beginning another, but splices them together 
by letting the old run taperiDgly on side by side with the 
enlarging new, till the new is strong enough in itself and 
in its environment to act alone. While the ethics of the 
world's past, and especially of its animal past, has been 
the survival of the fittest and the killing of the unfit, 
that is of those who relatively were weak and poor and 
un adapted to their surroundings, the coming human 
ethics is the preservation of the unfit by the fittest, the 
ethics that is especially the teaching of Christianity. 
But to carry out the higher principle all at once would 
crowd the world with invalids, idiots, criminals, tramps 
and barbarians, and would undo all that nature for ages 
at such an enormous cost has been trying to do. So for 
the present we are acting and are obliged to act in part 
under each of these two ethical systems, our churches 
and charitable societies and a few advanced individuals 
doing all they can to save the weak and poor, and our 
governments and business institutions and society at large 
all they can to crowd them, if not out of existence, yet 
down to an ever lower place ; and it is from the need of 
using both of what are such opposite principles that arise 
not a few of the great problems of our modern civiliza- 
tion, — our Indian question, our country's Philippine 
policy, the morality of England's South African War, 
the imposing of tariffs, how to deal with trusts, and, 
towering above all else, the world's Chinese problem. 

Yet, while evolution thus sanctions the use of both 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



25 



principles, the proportion in which thej shall be used is 
left to statesmanship and to humanity as their grand 
opportunity, and its lesson for them is that stress ought to 
be laid ever more and more on the side of the weak and 
the poor and physically unfit, those alike among indi- 
viduals, nations and races, — ought to be in the direction 
of their survival and of their development each after its 
own type. By a beautiful law of nature their care lifts the 
fit up into a higher kind of fitness, that which can be 
reached in no other way ; and in the world at large, while 
it will prevent its exclusive possession by the highest race 
of the highest religion, highest government, highest civili- 
zation, it will result in a fitness which is vastly better than 
that of the best alone, — in a variety of race, religion, gov- 
ernment and civilization where, as in the human body, 
the humblest organs will have their special place and work 
and will unite with the highest in producing a richer life 
and completer form than the highest could without their 
help. 

Periodicity, or what Mr. Spencer calls rhythm, is 
another element which has to be considered in accounting: 
for the ethics of evolution. Nothing in nature moves for- 
ward, or by the very constitution of nature can move 
forward, with even pace. There is first an advance ; then 
a rest, or perhaps retreat ; then an advance again a little 
further ; then another rest or retreat and advance, and so 
on, like the coming and going of the waves on the sea 
shore in what as a whole is a rising tide. Some of these 
periods, as with the waves of light, are only the millionth 
part of a second apart ; some, as with religion and business 
prosperity, stretch over twenty or thirty years ; and some ? 
as with the evolution of the different forms of life on the 
earth, are eons in length. 



26 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



The development of ethics follows this same law of 
rhythm. Just now the world is in the midst of a retreating 
wave, is losing apparently much of what we hoped it had 
permanently gained. "Wars are raging far and wide over 
the earth. Nations which took part in its great Peace Con- 
gress are among the first to rush to arms. The world's 
foremost republic is lapsing into imperialism. The grand 
principles of liberty, self-government and equality of 
rights, set forth in our Declaration of Independence, after 
a hundred years of reverence are being laughed to scorn. 
Even the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are denied, 
that, too, by some of its own preachers. The class distinc- 
tions of birth have given place to the class distinctions 
of wealth. The question with regard to the half civilized 
nations of the earth is which of the civilized ones in divid- 
ing them up shall get the largest slice of their territory. 
And everywhere the ape and tiger in man, which seemed 
to be dying out, have sprung up again into new life. 

It is a going back which apparently justifies pessimisim 
and is filling many good people with despair, — is some 
thing which here and there is even ascribed to evolution 
as its cause. Evolution is its cause, not the doctrine of 
evolution, however, but evolution itself. It is one of its 
great laws of progress, is a retreat which is the necessary 
preparation for another advance, is a going backward of 
the jumper only that he may leap a higher fence and reach 
a farther mark. Geology has had its times, one of them 
especially at|the close of what is called the Permian Era, 
when the whole physical world appeared to have reached 
its climax, and all its life alike animal and vegetable to 
be either dying out or sinking to a lower type ; and the 
finite observer looking then over its condition, would 
equally have despaired of its future. But, as the geologist 
can now see, it was only one of the stages preceding its 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



27 



great human era, was a sinking and dying, out of which 
have come the rising and living of the better and fairer 
world which is ours to-day. So with this Permian moral 
era. Peace will spring with new beauty from the fields 
which are being fertilized with war. America will return 
with fresh loyalty to its Declaration of Independence, the 
pulpit with revived ardor to preaching the Sermon on the 
Mount. The Jingo politician will be assigned to his true 
place as an ethic fossil. And the door of the East, which 
cannon can only smash, will be found to open wide to the 
touch of him who said of old, " I stand at the door and 
knock." 

Then, beyond this, there is under evolution a relativity 
even of the highest virtues to each other and to their 
environment which makes them very with circumstances 
as to the imperativeness of their use. As Mr. Spencer has 
well said, "Absolute ethics are possible only in an abso- 
lutely perfect social state." Some of them, to be sure, as 
those of honesty, veracity, justice, fidelity, kindness, self- 
sacrifice and the like, have been shown by such ages of 
human experience to be safest for man's welfare as to have 
in them for all ordinary cases the force of intrinsic Tight- 
ness, and he must be a very bold man who would dare 
depart from their dictates. 

But the world has found that all rules, even moral 
rules, have their exceptions, and that all stars, even the 
stirry virtues, differ from one another in the degrees of 
their brightness. Situations arise now and then in which 
it is impossible to be faithful to the one without being 
false to the other. There are conflicts of ethical as well 
as legislative laws ; kings in the realms of duty as well as 
of state between whose claims occasionally we have to 
choose. And much as we may condemn the principle in 



28 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



its Jesuistic shape of doing evil that good may come, we 
have out of our very love of right to say that when two evils 
are presented as alternatives, duty prompts, evil though 
it be, the doing of the least. Veracity is one of the man- 
liest of virtues, lying one of the meanest vices ; yet, if the 
cherry tree cut down is that of a patriot army's move- 
ments, and the issue between a truth and an untruth 
that of a country's liberty, where is the George Washing- 
ton fit to be its leader who will not say " I did not do it 
with my little hatchet." When Booth was trying to 
escape after the murder of Lincoln, was it right to give 
him food and shelter, that food and shelter which in any 
ordinary case it would have been a sin to have refused ? 
Who to save his wife and children from outrage does not 
feel that he ought to deceive and maim, and if need be, 
kill their assailant ? What are all wars, defensive as 
well as offensive, but a legalized cheating, wounding, 
pilfering and destroying of the foe, a direct violation 
right through from opening shot to closing shout, of 
religion's Golden Rule ? And, indeed, what is self-sacrifice 
itself, the highest virtue, but a deliberate choice between 
two wrongs, the wrong of allowing one's own life to be 
destroyed, which, if a man can prevent it, is suicide, or 
the wrong of seeing one's country, or cause, or fellow 
creatures, destroyed, which, if he can prevent it, is 
murder ? 

These are not questions merely of scholastic casuistry, 
but of actual life, specimens of what every man, consciously 
or unconsciously, has daily to meet; and the difficulties 
they involve are not peculiar to the ethics of evolution, 
but are what all ethics have to deal with. There 
is no system which can make right in spite of its 
etymology, otherwise than sometimes a very crooked 
line ; none which can have its higher without having also 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



29 



its lower law ; none which on a revolving earth can 
make its moral, any more than its mathematical per- 
pendicular, always lie in the same direction as regards 
absolute space. 

The advantage of evolution over other systems is that it 
provides at its very core a principle for dealing 
consistently with such difficulties, and that is the principle 
which makes the question, which of them is conducive 
to the highest welfare, the supreme test of their Tightness. 
It is no Greek Grammar which after giving a rule has to 
give it a long list of exceptions more difficult to learn 
than the rule itself ; no martinet soldier to enforce routines 
without regard to results ; no ship's captain with the 
motto "Obey orders, even if you break owners." It 
makes every man a part owner in the world's great ship, 
puts the port of a common well-being before him and 
says, While you use compass and stars and chart and all 
the experiences of the past as your help, use also your 
own brains, use also that force of evolution which is 
working in you not less than in all the past, and subordi- 
nate everything else, subordinate even compass and chart, 
if need be, to the one grand duty of reaching the port, — 
would say, were the alternative presented, let the heavens 
stay up even though justice fall. And what is this after 
all, wicked as it may sound in the phrases of evolution, 
but the great Christian doctrine, so precious to us in its 
Scripture words, that love is the fulfilling of the law, that 
each man is to judge for himself what is right, and that 
it is the spirit in which a thing is done, not obedience to 
its letter, which giveth life ? 

In thus making duties relative to each other and 
dependent on their environment for their imperativeness, 
the ethics of evolution is of necessity intensely practical. 



30 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



It would not indeed go to the extent of the Honduras 
woman Mr. Spencer speaks of, who refused to kill a hen 
for her sick husband, because, as she said, " her husband, 
might die and then she would lose him and the hen, too " — 
would not refuse to follow blindly sometimes a generous 
impulse. But on the whole, it does not believe much in 
pursuing virtue for its own sake "in scorn of consequence," 
especially when it is others who are involved in the con- 
sequence. Before it can say whether a thing is good, it. 
wants to know what it is good for. Art, poetry, music,, 
religion, beauty in all its forms are not despised by it, for 
it recognizes that they are all possible ministers to the 
world's well-being, but when they palpably fail of such- 
use and are only corrupting and degrading, it has no 
toleration for the reverence of art " for art's sake," or of 
" beauty as its own excuse for being," but joins with the 
most rigid iconoclast in its readiness to stamp them out. 
Deformity, poverty, pain, discord, ugliness in all its forms, 
likewise, are looked upon by it leniently as transition 
states and as possible means of discipline to man's higher 
nature, but never as objects to be sought after for what 
they are in themselves. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, while 
visiting a hospital of Incurables in Rome, filled with, 
wretches who had so little in the way of food that they 
fairly screamed to her for bread, asked an attendant, "Are 
there no charitable people in Eome to come and see them ?" 
" Oh, yes," the sister replied, "there are the Princess So- 
and-so, and the Countess Blank-and-blank, saintly ladies, 
who come once a week." "And don't they provide them 
with food ? " " No, signora, they don't do such things as 
that for them." " Then in Heaven's name what do they 
do ? " " Oh, they comb their hair," hair filled with filth 
and vermin ; and these great ladies took upon themselves 
the task not to relieve the sufferers, but as a work of the 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



31 



greater merit in saving their own souls because of its 
disgustingness. Evolutionary ethics has no place for such 
merits. It is very suspicious of any salvation which is 
to be realized away off in some other world. It believes 
in direct, outward salvation as the first thing to be sought, 
the salvation of the sufferers rather than of the saviors. 
Its method is to get rid of poverty and pain and ugliness, 
not to idealize them ; to feed the hungry and clothe the 
naked and clean the filthy, not to comb their hair. It is 
no anchorite, but a strong, well-fed, well-clothed, business- 
like man, most glad when it can do both things at once, 
make a dollar for the world and make a dollar for itself. 
And while in case of need it is ready to sacrifice every, 
thing it has, even life itself, for the common good, it 
believes that when the same thing can be accomplished 
without self-sacrifice, to do it without is the greater virtue 
and ought to be chosen. 

Again, if evolution takes off something from the rigid 
peaks of virtue, it adds vastly more to its breadth and 
depth. Every act which bears on welfare, and not what 
are called the intrinsic duties alone, is endowed by it with 
moral significance, the digging of a sewer more so at 
times than the preaching of a sermon, going to a political 
meeting than going to a church, — our eating and drinking, 
as Paul says, what can be done to the glory of God. And 
it includes logically our conduct to animals as well as to 
all classes of men, for it recognizes them all as the 
unfolding of one life-principle, and all as having their 
well-being as a means and part of the world's well-being. 
Indeed, there is nothing in the universe so trivial and 
minute that under such ethics its bettering may not 
become a duty. Hitherto, as you know, the germ theory 
of disease has been that human ills are caused by too 



32 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



active microbes, and that the way to cure men was to kill 
microbes ; but now, with more recent discoveries, it begins 
to look as if the cause of diseases is further back, — that 
it is only sick microbes which make sick men, and that 
to cure the men we need first to cure the microbes. So 
with humanity's larger moral body, to make sure of curing 
all its sicknesses, we must make healthy all its atoms. 

" From nature's chain whatever link you strike, 
Tenth or ten-thousandth, breaks the chain alike," 

and to have virtue wholly divine, it will have to be like 
the Deity Himself 

** As perfect in a hair as in;a heart." 

Moreover, with all the flexibility of its application and 
all the indistinctness of its outlines, the ethics of evolu- 
tion is very far from being, as so many even scholars 
have feared, without its solid foundation of everlasting 
principles. The two things are not by any means incon- 
sistent with each other. Everybody knows how it is 
with the outward rules of hygiene, — that what is one 
man's meat is proverbially another man's poison, that 
clothing worn with comfort in summer would to the same 
individual be fatal in winter, and that the out-of-door, all- 
weather exercise which makes the strong man stronger, 
takes away from the poor invalid what little strength he 
has. Yet who denies from such facts that there are great 
fundamental hygienic principles, imbedded in our very 
nature, which, if we are going to live at all, we have got 
to live by? 

It is the same with moral health. Intuitional ethics 
says its rules exist in the nature of things and are to be 
acted upon without regard to expediency by all people in 
all weathers. Evolutionary Ethics avoids the expression 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



33 



" nature of things " because in it nature does not mean real 
nature, or things actual things ; but it says instead that its 
laws exist in the constitution of the universe, must have 
been there from the very start, at least in the germ, other- 
wise, how could they ever have been evolved ; are the laws 
of human conduct which are in harmony with the laws of 
the world's conduct ; and that in being flexible to reason 
and common sense they are only on a par with all other 
natural laws. "Suaviterin modo, fortiter in re", is its 
motto ; 

"All the forms are fugitive, 
All the substances survive," 

is its song. And when it suspends any law, it is, as 
when those of gravity yield to those of chemistry and 
those of chemistry to those of vitality, not to make any 
interregnum of morals, but only to have a mightier law 
take its place, only because it would not have the letter 
which killeth supreme over the spirit which giveth life. 

Who shall say that such freedom of choice among 
principles makes them any the less fundamental ? Can 
there be anything in the metaphysician's outside-of-the- 
world nature-of-things more safe and solid on which to 
base conduct than this inside constitution of the universe ? 
And if the evolutionist is accused of having only the 
changing winds of expediency to live by, can he not 
truthfully answer, — 

"The winds that o'er my ocean run, 
Reach thro' all heavens beyond the sun ; 
Thro' life, thro' death, thro' fate, thro' time, 
Grand breaths of God they sweep sublime." 

Equally fixed and certain under evolution are the 
rewards and punishments of conduct. Instead of being 
arbitrary, loose and dependent for their enforcement on an 
external Divine will, its very definition of good conduct 
LofC. 



34 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



as that which tends to promote welfare, and bad conduct 
as that which tends to promote harm, puts it under its 
own laws and makes it its own executor. It agrees with 
the Bible that "as righteousness tendeth to life, so he that 
pursueth evil, pursueth it to his own death;" that "what- 
soever a man soweth that also shall he reap," natural good 
from natural seeds, spiritual fruit from spiritual sowing ; 
and that though justice sometimes is long delayed, yet "sin 
when it is finished, bringeth forth death," and well-doing, 
in due time, that is, when it has had time to ripen, its- 
harvest of good. 

" It knows the seed lies safe below 
The fires which blast and burn, 
And that for all in tears we sow, 
There waits a glad return." 

It has before it, just as truly as religion has, a kingdom 
of heaven, a kingdom whose beginning, at least, is to be 
on earth. The striving, self-sacrifice and even the sense 
of oughtness which it now has, are from their very nature 
not to last forever, not, at any rate, as the necessities of 
any one of its fields. What is striven for is to be attained. 
Private and public welfare are to be so adjusted to each 
other that self-seeking will do the work of self-sacrifice, 
egoism of altruism, — 

"All true self love and social be the same.' 

And with each repetition of a duty, tending, as we know 
it now does, to make its performance easier, how can it 
be otherwise than that the most difficult ones shall at last 
become habits, like the beating of the heart and the 
breathing of the lungs, carried on without effort and 
without consciousness, a realization, so far at least as 
they are concerned, of the old Buddhist Nirvana, and of 
what in Christianity is called "that peace of God which 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



35 



passeth understanding and which the world can neither 
give nor take away." 

Yet with all this, and all its utilitarianism, practicality 
and rootedness in the earth, the ethics of evolution is not 
without its ideality, its mystery, its poetry and its possi- 
bilities of infinite progress, — is very far from being a 
system under which, as Mr. Balfour says, " in becoming 
perfectly good we shall all become perfectly idiotic." 
Who has ever measured the length and breadth and 
height of that human welfare which is its ideal ? As 
with Whittier's waterfall,— 

" Somewhere it laughs and sings somewhere 
Whirls in mad dance its misty hair: 
But who hath raised its veil, or seen 
The rainbow skirts of that Undine ? " 

What opportunities are there for skill, courage, consecra- 
tion, heroism, all that is noblest in man, to bring up the 
world, even as it now is, to its highest ethical standard, — 
unite the nations in peace, level up and level down 
society's horrible class inequalities, abolish vice and 
wrong and ignorance, make the " concert of Europe " 
something else than a svmphony of battle guns, fill 
Turkish hearts with Armenian love, take the last stolen 
dollar out of man's hand, the last murdered bird off from 
woman's head, and teach countries that to knock their 
weaker brethren down on battlefields and rob them of 
their colonies is no more Christian than for highwaymen 
to knock travelers down in streets and rob them of their 
<sash. 

Then, with each new social state, each larger and com- 
plexer environment, something which is sure to come 
with evolution, how inevitably must there be a larger and 
and complexer ethics for the promotion of its welfare. 



36 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



Said a fond mother looking down at her puling, squal- 
ling baby, 1 1 he is only eleven days old yet, and of course 
has some failings, but" — turning to the visitor — " I think 
he gives promise already of being at least a very truthful 
man." Humanity now, as compared with its mighty 
future, is little more than eleven days old, but to the fond 
eyes of evolutionary ethics it gives promise amid all, even 
of its puling and crying infancy, of a manhood, how 
large and true. Read Lecky's History of European 
Morals as some hint of the ethical progress, not only in 
virtues but in ideals of virtue, that we can fairly look for 
in the eighteen hundred years to come. Scientifically, as 
well as poetically, does earth have before it 

ts A dream of man and woman 

Diviner but still human, 
Solving the riddle old, 
Shaping the age of gold " 

And beyona earth, who can doubt that ethics with its new 
spiritual environment will have new heights to climb, new 
realms to enter upon, and that what here had to include 
the welfare of every hovel and every savage will have 
finally to include the welfare of every hell and every soul ? 

It is in this possibility that the peace of Christianity 
differs from the Nirvana of Buddhism. As fast as one 
faculty, one virtue, one part of our nature attains it, the 
vitality released from the need of struggling for its attain- 
ment goes into the unfolding of another, and then another, 
just as it does now ; and thus it becomes possible for the 
soul to go on climbing up forever the stairway of Jesus' 
command, " Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven 
is perfect." 

It is an ethics which in thus throwing its light forward, 
throws it backward, — gives the whole universe, even its 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



37 



darkest parts, a moral meaning. When we want to 
know whether a tree is good or bad, we do not use 
its roots, or trunk, or limbs or leaves as a criterion, 
much less its spines and bark, but its fruit ; and, if this 
is sweet and wholesome and what all the other parts 
have tended to produce, even though it is only a small 
part of its whole bulk, and appears only after many 
years of its life, we call the whole tree, including its 
darkest root and its sharpest spine, a good tree. 

Why should we not apply the same principle to oui 
judgment of the Universe, fruiting little by little in 
a moral man, — recognize it all through from nebulous 
root to the bark and spine of human cruelty and ignor- 
ance and sin as a moral Universe ? According to the 
fundamental principles of evolution, all that will be in 
it at its highest reach of ethical attainment must have 
been as a possibility in its original fire mist. Matter 
is moral, gravity virtuous ; the dragons of far off 
geologic ages 

" That tore each other in their slime " 

were a part of the violent who with their violence were 
taking the kingdom of heaven. The roots of mercy are 
in the earthquake ; the seeds of love in the thunderbolt. 
Even sin has its side of saintliness ; even wrong its work 
for right. They are all the stages of an evolving 
universe, all a part of the things that are working 
together for good. And justly they must all share 
in the character of its final outcome — the Satans of 
nature not less than of Job report at last as sons of God in 
the court of their common Lord. 

Viewed thus, how rich is the subject, not only in 
philosophic interest but in its satisfaction to one of man's 



38 



The Ethics of Evolution. 



deepest heart wants. Cold as the word morality lu 
sometimes thought to be, all our hopes, all our happiness^ 
.all our safeguards, all the best parts even of love, are 
bound up with what it represents. Without an ethical 
element at the world's core, how little could the splendor 
of its skies, the grandeur of its mountains and seas, 
the abundance of its physical comforts, and its manifes- 
tations of majesty and might make it a really desirable 
dwelling place for beings like man, — as little so as a 
magnificent city in which was no provision, outward or 
inward, for enforcing what is right. And it was the 
feeling that evolution did away witk this element — 
deprived the world of a lawgiver, and so necessarily of a 
moral law, which prompted at first religion's opposition 
to Spencer and Darwin. How baseless the fear ! Their 
teaching has revealed under the broken tables of Sinai 
the unbreakable tables of the soul, made the Sermon on 
the Mount a part of the sermon of the universe, and in 
place of a policeman God armed with a club, walking 
the world's streets, has unveiled a Divine Principle 
in the world itself whose wand is simply welfare. 
Evolution has done many wonderful things intel- 
lectually for man. It has lighted up the dark 
caverns of the earth below and flooded with radiance 
its vast animal and vegetable kingdoms up above. 
History has under it a new meaning; society a key 
which unlocks not a few of its intricacies ; religion 
the only lens which can focus again its broken lights. 
It has given to psychology the first glimmer of sense 
it ever had, and revealed in heredity marvels of the 
mind that render miracles commonplace. But its crown- 
ing gift, after all, tried alike by what it is and what 
it does, is— The Ethics of Evolution. 



i o.nO 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
(724) 779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 591 659 6 * 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



III 

013 591 659 6 



